At the ripe old age of 98, the famous French artist Louise Bourgeois died this week. She didn’t become a contemporary art celebrity until she reached her 70s, so it’s lucky she was vigorous enough to enjoy a few decades of her glory years.

Bourgeois is best known as a sculptor who created giant spiders, many-breasted women, and two-headed phalluses. She despised her philandering wanker father. He made the fatal misstep of having an affair with his children’s nanny/tutor. Talk about gauche (and unoriginal). But Bourgeois got back at him in the end, with an installation in his honor, “The Destruction of the Father,” a representation of her family dismembering and eating him.

Bourgeois is an inspiration because she succeeded in channeling psychological traumas into art that is both shocking and marketable.

- Haley Hogan

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